It seems the keyboard is not being recognised and so nothing is happening. Anyone have this problem? If you have the game installed, I recommend you try it, if you haven't in a while!

I probably just ran into the same thing. The game starts up just fine, but when the language selection comes up, it just constantly keeps changing among all the options, and if you blindly pick one and get to the main menu, only the down key works (not up), and I wasn't able to navigate through the settings window at all.

Poking through the logs a bit (~/.config/unity3d/Stegosoft Games/Ara Fell/Player.log) I found a number of errors like so:

Fallback handler could not load library ~/gog-linux/Ara Fell/game/Ara Fell_Data/Mono/libudev.so
Fallback handler could not load library ~/gog-linux/Ara Fell/game/Ara Fell_Data/Mono/libudev.so
Fallback handler could not load library ~/gog-linux/Ara Fell/game/Ara Fell_Data/Mono/libudev.so
Fallback handler could not load library ~/gog-linux/Ara Fell/game/Ara Fell_Data/Mono/libudev.so.0
Fallback handler could not load library ~/gog-linux/Ara Fell/game/Ara Fell_Data/Mono/libudev.so.0.so
Fallback handler could not load library ~/gog-linux/Ara Fell/game/Ara Fell_Data/Mono/libudev.so.0
Plugins: Couldn't open libudev, error: libudev: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

That was a significant tip off. I installed sys-libs/libudev-compat (Gentoo - YMMV), which provides libudev.so.0, and the second half of that error block goes away and the keyboard starts working in Ara Fell.

Hope that helps someone else!

Apparently I spoke too soon. The suggestion in the previous post worked... once, or it may have just worked by accident. Either way, after that it was back to the original broken state and I have yet to get it working again on that machine.

I tried two other machines and it works perfectly fine on both of them, even with the exact same version of udev (and without libudev-compat), so I suspect the error messages I found before were just a red herring. Very annoying to not be able to find the real problem, I may look into this further.